


Remember?

by RhinoHill



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Canon Backstory, F/M, Feel-good, Romantic Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 01:08:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29427906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RhinoHill/pseuds/RhinoHill
Summary: Suddenly, under the light of twin suns, I want to ask.“Carter?”“Hmmm?” She glances up at me, the trace of her smile still in her eyes.“How long have you known about my memory?”--oOo--
Relationships: Samantha "Sam" Carter/Jack O'Neill
Comments: 47
Kudos: 106





	Remember?

**Author's Note:**

> If you've ever pondered why Jack pretends to be SO uninterested in anything except cake and fishing, but still made it to one of the highest ranks in the Air Force, you're not alone.
> 
> Here's my opinion.
> 
> I actually started and abandoned this piece twice, once as part of the epic saga that is A Thousand Days, and once for the Stargate 2020/2021 Winter Fic Exchange.
> 
> But it didn't really fit in either place.  
> And today is Valentine's Day.
> 
> So instead, I offer it as a little box of heart-shaped thoughts to every one who takes the time to read and comment and leave kudos on my work, or to reach out in other ways and show me how much you care.
> 
> You are suns in my midnight sky  
> xo
> 
> \--oOo--

*Jack*

One of the things I love most about her is the way she sees me, and simply lets me be. No judgement. No pushing. Just blue eyes, sharp with knowing and soft with understanding.

This planet we’re on is messing with my sleep. It’s uninhabited, and as unremarkable as an open fireplace in hell, but it has two suns that somehow keep it light twenty-four hours a day. It has mineral deposits that make Carter vibrate with excitement, and rock carvings that give Daniel wet dreams.

But all it does for me is keep me awake.

I can’t sleep when it’s light out.

At what should be 2am but feels like midday, two hours before her watch ends and mine begins, I give up and wander out to where she’s propped on the ground in front of the dead cooking fire from last night, her back against a fallen log, her knees drawn up in front of her.

I jam my cap further over my tired eyes to hide them, even thought I know she’ll see that, too.

“Turn in, Carter. I’ve got this,” I say in greeting when she turns her silent question in my direction.

But she doesn’t move, just looks at me as I walk closer and perch on the log near her shoulder, inexorably drawn to her.

“I’m serious, Major. Get some sleep. No reason two of us have to go without.”

It’s the exhaustion, my brain warns me, that makes me feel I’m falling headfirst into her gaze.

Lack of sleep does strange things to perception and emotion. It’s why it’s used as a torture tactic.

“Is it the light?” She asks quietly. Her voice hums with care.

“Yeah. Never been able to sleep when it’s light out.” I glare at the piece of bark I’m picking at, because her eyes are pulling harder and harder, urging me to curl up against her. “’S the reason I turned the North Polers down when they asked me to become their president.”

The corners of her mouth crease into a hint of a smile.

God, I love that smile.

_Snap out of it, Jack._

Shaking my head to clear the warning voice, I stand abruptly.

“Fine. Well, I’m makin’ coffee. Ya want?” It sounds angrier than I meant and my heart clenches.

She simply nods. “Thanks, Sir.”

With what I hope looks like casual interest, I drag a charred lump of wood the size of my fist out of the fire and kick it to a spot near her. I’m excited — dangerously excited — by the thought of sitting next to her in a silent, sleeping world with nothing to do but sip coffee and _be._ Be close enough to touch.

And sleep deprivation wreaks havoc on impulse control. I need something to keep my hands busy. Because the patch of grass she’s sitting on is just big enough for two. Because, as I hand her her mug, she shifts an inch to the left to make room for me.

While we wait for our coffee to cool, I grab the lump and my penknife and start whittling.

She says nothing, I say nothing, until a badger’s head starts emerging from under my blade, the streaks of char swirling in wide circles over its muzzle.

“I’ve not seen you carve before,” she comments over the rim of her mug.

I raise one shoulder. “Didn’t want to dazzle ya all at once.”

She huffs a gentle laugh.

It’s been five years since she stepped into the briefing room at the SGC and turned my belly to gumbo.

It’s been months since she turned those knowing eyes on me and made me say how much I cared about her. And she said the same.

Nothing needed to change, she told me that day.

But everything changed for me.

Every night, I stare at my empty bed and wonder why I don’t just quit so I can love her in broad daylight.

Oh, the irony of sitting next to her on a nightless planet.

“Is that a badger?” She breaks into my reverie. “I’ve always loved them. They’re the ultimate paradox. So gentle looking, even though they’re powerful enough to break your arm. So graceful when they trot through the woods despite their stocky little bodies.”

I look at her before I can stop myself, surprised by the tenderness in her words.

She’s looking at the little creature in my hands with a fond smile that reaches all the way to her eyes, the way I’ve only seen her smile when she looks at children or animals.

I swallow around the lump she’s brought to my throat.

“Well, if he turns out not to look embarrassing once I’m through with him, he can go home with you. I’ll tell him to remind ya to stop putting in so much overtime, since you clearly don’t listen when I tell you that.”

She rolls her eyes. But the smile remains.

“He’s beautiful. I’d love to have him.”

Time spools out between us.

“Do you do this often?” She picks up the conversation again, gesturing at my hands with her chin.

And it’s the warmth in her tone that draws the truth out of my fuzz-tired brain before I have a chance to stop it.

“After loud days. When I can’t take anything else in. This doesn’t add memories.”

It’s cryptic, as an answer. A livestream of my thoughts that I half hope she won’t decipher. Yet when her eyes focus on my face, sharp with knowing over her kind smile, its as if a door in my chest opens and a trapped bird flies to freedom.

She is one of the only people at the SGC who knows about my memory, about the way every face I see, every line I read, every snippet of overheard conversation, lodges itself in my head like a lead-tipped arrow, burrowing painfully in search of a place to rest.

I don’t know when she realised, or even if she knew for sure or was just testing an idle theory on the day she pretended to be looking for the name of a planet we had seen only once, in a glimpse of a file. She had tapped her fingertips together as if reaching for it in order to explain the Nox’s ability to camouflage themselves and their cities.

I’d supplied the planet’s designation without thinking.

Then there was a moment. A quiet second in which those blue eyes pinned me with recognition.

Before anyone else could notice, she repeated the planet’s name and continued her explanation. It was a good theory. Nobody else seemed to notice that it had nothing to do with the planet she’d gotten me to admit to recalling.

The next day at lunch, while going over the names of a group of recruits, she wondered out loud if MacKenzie was any relation to the relief cook in the kitchen who always added lemon to everything.

“No, he has no A in his surname,” I had thrown in her direction.

Again, her eyes had held mine. I had glanced at the paper only once before passing it to her, since she was the one meant to be lecturing them. Too late, I realised she hadn’t told me how Cadet James MacKenzie’s surname was spelt.

That was three years ago.

I’d spent a week agonising over how to talk to her about it, how to tell her that it was no blessing, but a curse, that I had no way to stop things lodging in my head. How busy days created so much noise from new memories that my brain physically hurt.

But she’d never mentioned it again. And after a while, the urgency to ask her to keep my secret had faded, because she never tricked me into revealing it again.

She’d started doing something after that day in the commissary, though.

Taking more of the reasoning and calculation for our missions on herself. Not explaining her science unless I asked. Memorising things for SG-1 so that I wouldn’t have to. But occasionally, she’d push a sheet with a crucial calculation in front of me, almost casually. Once, only once, she’d asked me to help her remember an equation she’d shown me the day before. I wrote it down, she punched it into the Goa’uld computer and saved us in the nick of time. We never spoke of how she knew to ask. It was omitted from both of our reports.

She started a happier new ritual, too. During team nights at O’Malley’s, when she could see I was relaxed and enjoying myself, she’d check with me whether the person whose ass she was about to hand to them on a plate at the pool table had any connection to the SGC. She never embarrassed anyone who worked with us. And, on days when I was tired, I often realised only after returning home that she had passed up all invitations to play someone unknown that night.

Suddenly, under the light of twin suns, I want to ask.

“Carter?”

“Hmmm?” She glances up at me, the trace of her smile still in her eyes.

“How long have you known about my memory?”

She sits up straighter. Moving slowly, as if scared of startling a wild animal, she puts her coffee down on the ground.

Her tongue darts out between her lips.

“I suspected from our third mission.”

Her voice is soft, barely more than a whisper.

“You only ever forgot people’s names when you were calm. When you were angry — whenever any of us was in danger, you knew every single fact and face and name without fail. It made me wonder if the forgetting was a ruse to protect your secret.”

I know exactly the situation she was talking about. I had never worried for her safety when she’d been kidnapped and traded for another woman. I knew she could take that basterd Turghan and every member of his godforsaken tribe in hand to hand. I’d even feigned amusement at the blue, veiled dress-thing they’d put her in, because I couldn’t let anyone see the reaction her bare skin and her figure elicited from me. But the second I saw her discomfort turn to shame, I had called every fucking person in the camp by their full name.

I can’t believe she noticed that in the middle of everything she was going through.

But that was eighteen months before she tricked me into revealing the name of that planet she claimed she needed to explain the Nox technology.

“What made you wait eighteen months to pull those stunts with the planet and MacKenzie, then?”

I may be the one with the photographic memory, but I know from the way she tenses that she knows exactly what I mean.

She looks down at her fingers, interlaces them tightly between her knees.

I stop all pretence of carving.

For a minute, she just stares ahead. When she speaks, her voice is half a whisper.

“Jolinar loved Martouf for centuries. She told me — he did too — that it was rare to have such a deep and pure connection, even amongst beings who lived for a thousand years…”

Her words trail into silence.

I don’t know why, but I don’t want a knife in my hands right now. I reach my right arm out as far from me as I can and set it on the ground. Without understanding the reason, I know that this fragile space we’re in is too delicate for weapons.

The first sun is casting shadows behind us, and the second raises its fiery crown ahead.

“I recognised the feeling. I knew it. From you.”

Her statement is so soft, I almost think I’ve imagined it. But the fear twisting her mouth shows me here words were real.

She sucks the fragrant air in through her nose, and for a breath I taste the same wild heather on the breeze as she does, and it makes me feel closer to her even than I am. Then she speaks on.

“I thought… I thought maybe, if I could figure out why you are the way you are, then I would feel… less…”

Her throat moves as she swallows, echoing my own convulsive movement.

She hangs her head.

“I’m sorry for turning you into a problem to be solved,” she sighs.

_Then I would feel less. I knew the feeling from you. Such a deep and pure connection._

She felt it too.

The door in my chest, the one I didn’t realise was holding songbirds captive until now, swings wide into the perpetual dawn and yellow wings of hope take to the sky.

“You have nothing to apologise for, Sam.”

I set the lump of wood with the badger’s head emerging from it on the ground between us. All I want is to hold her. But we’re on mission. And as long as I’m her C.O., I’ll never let myself trust that she isn’t obeying orders if I ask her to love me.

The fingers of her right hand reach out to stroke the little animal’s roughly hewn head before coming to rest on the patch of grass between our legs.

I drop my hand to the ground, shuffling it closer, until the back of my knuckles brush the back of hers.

She straightens her fingers, and I follow her lead, until every one of my joints find a resting place against her skin, and hers against mine.

We’re not holding hands. No.

But our hands are pressed together, back to back. And it’s the closest I’ve felt to my heart in a lifetime.

—oOo—

My watch buzzes my wakeup call against my wrist.

My eyelids flutter up, gritty with sleep. Exhaustion coats my tongue with anaesthetic.

I’m sitting, not lying. It’s light out. And I feel as if I’ve just fallen asleep for the first time in weeks.

With a groan, I reach over to my left wrist to silence the alarm.

Instead of my wrist, my hand closes over her fingers.

Sam’s here. Sam’s here. And she’s silencing my watch.

Last night, yesterday, the whole fucking mission, crowd in around me.

But her voice cuts through my thoughts.

“Close your eyes,” she whispers. “I’ve got this.”

And it all comes crowding back. Inevitable.

She knows me. She she sees me. She feels it, too. _She_ _feels it, too._

But I’m responsible for her.

I wish I had her way with words. Wish I had her gentleness.

“Carter, it’s my watch.” I growl.

On a normal day, she would follow my order.

I guess it’s not a normal day.

Because instead of rising, her pinky finger curls through the grass to twine around mine, binding us together. A single finger clasped against the universe, in the brightening double dawn.

“Let me do this for you,” she whispers.

And by the light of two alien suns, I lean my head against her shoulder.

And I sleep.


End file.
